Today’s daf continues this chapter’s discussion of the biblical prohibition against slaughtering an animal and its offspring on the same day. The standard punishment for violating this commandment is 40 lashes, but that multiplies if the prohibition is violated multiple times. One of the mishnahs on today’s daf explains how:
If one slaughtered a cow and thereafter slaughtered two of its offspring on the same day, he incurs 80 lashes.
If one slaughtered its two offspring and thereafter slaughtered the mother cow, he incurs 40 lashes.
If one slaughtered the mother and its daughter and, later that day, slaughtered its daughter’s daughter, he incurs 80 lashes.
The mishnah teaches that once a mother is slaughtered, a person is punished with a separate set of lashes for each time an offspring is slaughtered afterwards. If multiple offspring are slaughtered first and then the mother is slaughtered, however, the person who slaughtered the animals has only violated the prohibition once — at the time the mother was slaughtered — and thus only receives one set of lashes.
The Gemara opens with a basic question that casts doubt on the very premise of the mishnah. The mishnah holds that one is punished with 40 lashes for slaughtering two calves and then slaughtering their mother. But why is that forbidden in the first place? After all, the verse in Leviticus states, “It (the mother) and its offspring,” which could imply that it is only forbidden to slaughter the mother before the offspring, but not the other way around.
The Gemara immediately rejects this argument by quoting a beraita.
When the verse states: “You shall not slaughter (plural subject) both in one day” (Leviticus 22:28), this is referring to two people who are prohibited from slaughtering on the same day, as the word “slaughter” is phrased in the plural. How so? If, during the course of a single day, there is one person who slaughters the cow and then another who slaughters that cow’s mother, and then there is another person who slaughters that cow’s offspring, the two latter people are liable, the first of them for slaughtering the mother after its offspring was slaughtered, and the second person for slaughtering the offspring after its mother was slaughtered.
When the Torah prohibits slaughtering a mother and its offspring on the same day, it does so in the plural. Had the prohibition been phrased in the singular, we might have erroneously thought that the prohibition only applies to one person, but that different people would be allowed to slaughter a mother and its offspring on the same day. By phrasing the prohibition in the plural, we learn unequivocally that the mother and its offspring may not be slaughtered on the same day, regardless of how many individuals are involved.
We still, however, need to derive that the prohibition applies regardless of the order in which the animals were slaughtered. That was the Gemara’s opening question, and now we get an answer based on another grammatical analysis.
The verse in Leviticus phrases the prohibition in the second person, “you shall not slaughter.” Had the Torah only wanted to teach that the prohibition applies to multiple individuals, however, it could have phrased it in the third person, “they shall not be slaughtered,” in reference to the animals. Since the Torah uses the second person instead, we can assume that it wanted us to derive a law in addition to the one extending the prohibition to multiple individuals.
That extra law is the one we have been searching for: that the prohibition applies regardless of the order in which the animals were slaughtered. Even if the offspring is slaughtered before the mother, the individual (or individuals) who slaughtered have transgressed the law in Leviticus.
It’s interesting to note that the Gemara questions the premise of the mishnah (that the order is unimportant) even though there is already a beraita with a clear answer. We can assume that the editors of the Gemara knew of that beraita when they posed the question, so why pose it in the first place?
Perhaps it is because the Gemara has questions about this beraita that it wants to express, and the initial challenge provides an opening to introduce the beraita and then pose those questions. More broadly, though, the Gemara is training us, as its learners, to question basic assumptions, even when we have proof that those assumptions are correct.
Read all of Chullin 82 on Sefaria.
This piece originally appeared in a My Jewish Learning Daf Yomi email newsletter sent on July 21, 2026. If you are interested in receiving the newsletter, sign up here.
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